McGill does not have a family he needs to support after he dies. Unlike Breaking Bad, however, it's not the world that's to blame. James McGill is a man with a fate, heading inexorably toward a Cinnabon. Walter White was the victim of circumstance, blindly stumbling through the world toward a more or less meaningless death. We are following him on his journey to both conclusions: the outcast loser and the hyper-confident prick with no ethics. We also know that he turns into the terrified manager of a Cinnabon who drinks. The frame of Better Call Saul is a prequel, which means we know that McGill turns into Goodman, the pure scumbag lawyer. He gropes blindly toward his end, and the audience gropes with him.īetter Call Saul doesn't work that way. Walter's moral decline is pegged entirely to the material realities he faces. On one side is 'murder is wrong.' On the other is 'He'll kill your entire family if you let him go.' White doesn't really have choices, or rather he has choices that don't feel like choices while he's living them. Early in the first season, he makes a list of the pros and cons of killing Krazy-8.

He needed, for example, to kill people every now and then. And the meth business had equally simple requirements. He loved his family and he was dying and the only way he could help them (in his mind) was by starting up a meth business. The tenets of his personality were very basic. It has become something more, too: a show that not only follows on from its predecessor but has become a commentary on it, a companion show to the original.īoth fall under the by now well-established category of the study of 'Difficult Men.' From The Sopranos on, these shows have articulated the same dramatic situation over and over again: What happens to men living in a world of decline? Breaking Bad was the purest example of the genre because it framed the question in the starkest possible terms: a dedicated chemistry teacher and dad who, due to cancer and poverty, converts himself into a drug kingpin.īut Walter White, and the show in which he starred, was always a simple formulation: He did what he had to do. But Better Call Saul has been like Breaking Bad without the boring bits. Spin-offs are supposed to be worse than the shows that gave birth to them. Warning: mild spoilers for the first season finale below.įor a show that is literally derivative, Better Call Saul has been startlingly original over the course of its first season, which just ended with episode 10 tonight.

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